Based on The Hunter, the first of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's super-tough Parker thrillers, Point Blank was one of the most brutal and inventively eye-popping thrillers of the 60s. Protected by his sympathetic star, Lee Marvin, new-in-LA Londoner John Boorman was able to juice up this Red Harvest-like corporate thriller with a still arresting visual scheme that makes Los Angeles a phantasmagoric city of neon and scalding sunlight – half noir, half Alphaville.

Marvin plays the violent, amoral and unstoppable Walker, who works his way up through the aptly named Cineplex Corporation to track down "my 83,000 dollars," (stolen from him in the opening robbery on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco). He discovers that hard cash is as obsolete and outmoded as he is ("why," one of his antagonists wails, "we probably don't have $20 in the whole building!"), as the world becomes ever more digitised and inhuman. It feels like a western (Walker as doomed cowboy in the age of the combustion engine) or a ghost story (does Walker actually die in the opening sequence?); and with its lurid Godardian colours and its Antonioniesque sense of alienation, it looks like a smashed mirror on whose shards can briefly be seen all the reflected pathologies of the City of Night.